This assumes that the lampshade allegedly examined by Benecke was indeed one of those found in the house of the former commandant of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Karl-Otto Koch.
Everything that I have read about those lampshades has stated that they disappeared, and have never been found. Where did Benecke find the lampshade he allegedly examined?
PS: The article at the website of the Buchenwald Memorial states that the lampshade was publicly exhibited at the Memorial from 1954 to 1990, when the Buchenwald site was in East German territory, but that it was removed from public display in 1990, allegedly "for ethical reasons".
One is left wondering where this article was before 1954, and where it came from. I recall that way back in the 1950s the former US High Commissioner in the US Occupation Zone, McCloy, stated that the lampshades had been found to be made of goatskin.
I remain skeptical, particularly as a previous examination of this article in 1993 found that it was made of plastic, suggesting that it was a forgery manufactured by the East Germans or the Soviets at some time before 1954, and was not one of the articles found at Buchenwald and put on display immediately after the capture of the camp by the US Army in April 1945, and shown in photos of that display.
I think we need further details of the tests applied by Benecke before his conclusions can be accepted unreservedly. The article at the Buchenwald Memorial website is also dubious, because it claims that a piece of tattooed human skin held in the Memorial's collection was part of the so-called large lampshade, the one seen in photos of the April 1945 display of human remains found at Buchenwald. However, the origin of the pieces of tattooed human skin found at Buchenwald is in fact well known; they were part of a collection of samples of tattooed human skin taken from deceased prisoners made by one of the SS doctors, for the purpose of writing a thesis on the connection between the practice of tattooing and organised criminality. There is also the thesis that Himmler had ordered the collection of specimens of tattooed skin for display in a Museum of Criminality that he proposed to establish after the war.
The collection of tattooed skin from executed criminals was in fact not unusual at the time. There was a Romanian forensic scientist, Dr Nicolae Minovici, who had made such a collection in the 19th Century, and there is the possibility that that collection was the inspiration for the thesis planned by the SS doctor at Buchenwald. What it shows is that the collection of human skin was by no means unique to the SS, and thus not specifically a sign off their '"dehumanisation", as claimed in the article.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... splay.html
https://www.vice.com/da/article/yvqywv/ ... n-skin-876
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Minovici
https://www.bizzarrobazar.com/en/2015/1 ... -minovici/